Watch Man Speed Up ‘Call Me Maybe’ With His Heartbeat

One of the stranger fruits born by Music Hack Day Boston this past weekend was Heart Beats, which mashes a heart-rate-detecting watch with Max/MSP to control music’s tempo with the subject’s heartbeat.

Luckily, you don’t need to worry about that now, because there is only one instance of Heart Beats technology — and it involves duct tape. That doesn’t mean you can’t get a kick of watching it in action in the video below.

Here’s Ryan Challinor’s Heart Beats hack controlling the tempo of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” (a song I hope will jump the proverbial shark soon, because I think this was the last time I could bear to hear it). Regardless, this is a neat hack and it works like a charm, despite using a camera to watch the readout of the user’s heart rate.

“It uses a heart-rate monitor that wirelessly communicates with a watch, and there is a webcam duct-taped to the watch with quick ‘n’ dirty OCR to read the heart rate in Max/MSP,” adds Challinor. “The heart rate is divided by the original tempo of the song, which determines the speed at which the song should play.” Neat.